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Thorium touted as The Answer to our energy needs

As Japan digs for its dead, copes with hundreds of thousands of homeless, and races to cool down its stricken reactors, the world is having a meltdown over nuclear power.

And, with climate change bearing down on the planet, everyone’s wondering what the energy future will be.

Coal’s too dirty, hydro can’t meet all our needs, power from wind and solar is intermittent, and oil? Well, the world just keeps going to war over that.

Which is why the idea of thorium-based reactors has exploded into the nuclear debate.

This radioactive metal is increasingly being touted as The Answer.

“Here’s a solution that’s in front of us that can solve multiple problems,” says retired physicist and IT specialist Robert Hargraves. “It can tackle global warming. To the extent that we can make fuel, we can reduce our dependency on the Mideast.”

Brief chemistry refresher course: atomic number 90, symbol Th, just two protons fewer than uranium, and four fewer than plutonium, shiny, silvery-white — and almost as common as dirt. The metal was discovered in 1828 and named for Thor, the Norse god of thunder.

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Thorium’s fans — nuclear scientists and engineers, chemists and physicists, even some environmentalists — have become almost cult-like in their promotion of thorium as the solution to most of the world’s energy problems.

They say that, among other things, a well-designed thorium-fuelled plant beats the uranium-based system on all fronts.

For one thing, there’s enough easily mined thorium in the ground to power the world for a thousand years. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the United States has an estimated 440,000 tonnes, Australia and India about 300,000 tonnes each, and Canada about 100,000 tonnes.

It’s supposedly safer and produces much less waste. The waste it does produce loses its radiotoxicity in about 300 years, as opposed to tens or hundreds of thousands for conventional uranium waste.

Plus, get this, it actually feeds on radioactive plutonium waste, one of the nastiest substances on earth, as part of its power-generating process. That’s important because the disposal of plutonium is probably the nuclear industry’s most vexing problem.

Although there are no thorium reactors currently in operation, they have worked in the past, in both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. Right now China and India are developing them.

According to their proponents, liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs) would be much smaller in scale than the nuclear plants in Pickering and Darlington, and would be resistant to what scientists refer to as proliferation — the manufacture of nuclear weapons.

Interest in thorium has intensified so much that a previously esoteric website called Energy From Thorium ( http://energyfromthorium.com/) has been crashing. Its host and creator, Kirk Sorenson, an Alabama-based NASA veteran, nuclear technologist and aerospace engineer, has had to apologize to his growing number of Facebook followers for server crashes.

So besieged is he with requests for interviews about thorium — whose cult-like following says one tonne of it produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal — that he emails his regrets to the TorontoStar that he can’t talk before this story’s deadline.

But he does tell the forward-looking U.S. magazine Fast Company that, had Japan built LFTRs or molten salt reactors (MSRs) with thorium instead of the more common and conventional uranium-based light water reactors (LWRs), nobody would be looking at their Japanese-sourced foodstuffs suspiciously today.

“A major problem at Fukushima was that the tsunami knocked out the emergency power system that was supposed to pump water through the plant to keep it cool,” Sorensen said.

He says LFTR designs automatically shut themselves down, even if emergency power is lost. What’s more, they probably never would have reached a dangerous melting point — at least 1,400 degrees Celsius — to begin with.

Explains Ottawa-based physicist David Leblanc, whose company Ottawa Valley Research Associates is developing a new generation of MSRs: “We have nothing to push the radioactive material out. We’ve got nothing that explodes. We’ve got no pressure. We’ve got no steam. We’ve got no water that could turn into hydrogen that could then explode.

“There’s nothing to go boom, so to speak.”

All of which helps explain why thorium has gone nuclear this month.

From a few Twitter mentions a week to several thousand a day. Coverage on every major scientific website, as well as pieces in London’s Daily Telegraph and The Wall Street Journal. All of them singing the praises of this humble and largely anonymous element.

Hargraves is author of the booklet “AIM High,” which attempts to demonstrate that not only can LFTRs be cleaner and greener, they probably could be built on assembly lines, one a day, like Boeing airliners, and sited in places where electricity is currently unaffordable.

“My motivation is years of frustration listening to people complain about high energy prices, or wars in the Mideast, our energy dependence and now global warming — and not taking action with an effective solution,” he says on the phone from his home in Hanover, Maine.

Is there really no risk of meltdown with thorium?

“Meltdown just doesn’t happen,” insists Leblanc. “All of us, especially since Japan, have been doing a lot of what ifs? What if we had a tsunami? What if we had floods? What if we had a meteor strike? It’s just really hard for any of us to imagine any kind of danger to the public. It’s really hard to imagine any mess getting beyond the plant gate.”

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Thorium pitches are really just “appeals for public funding,” he says: “Thorium reactors are only one of a significant number of long-term dreams to plant soybeans in Antarctica with the help of nuclear sun lamps. There is almost no limit to the dreams you can have with an endless, too-cheap-to-meter source of clean, benign, what-could-possibly-go-wrong energy.”

Needless to say, Rubin is not impressed. Not just with LFTRs, but with nuclear power plants in general.

“Thorium doesn’t eliminate the problems,” he contends. “If the nuclear industry’s problem was affording uranium, then switching to thorium might solve their problem. But that’s not their problem. The fuel cost in today’s reactors is a tiny fraction of the total cost. That’s not what is giving the Ontario government sticker shock about the next two reactors at Darlington. They’re solving a non-problem by substituting a cheaper fuel for uranium. Unless they solve the big problems, they’ve got a curiosity there instead of a practical solution to anybody’s problems.”

But if, as proponents say, the thorium fuel cycle is so fantastic, why did the world go with uranium?

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Long story very short and simple: In the 1950s, in the Cold War-obsessed U.S., there was essentially a competition between uranium- and thorium-based systems. It was determined that the former, used in a light water reactor, was the quickest and easiest way to power a nuclear submarine. The bonus was that the waste from the LWR process could be used to make bombs. And so Washington went with uranium while an MSR experiment — a thorium-based plant — at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee was mothballed.

But it wasn’t because the experiment was a bust. It ran incident-free for five years.

Now, India and China are pursuing thorium-based reactors.

So what’s stopping us now?

“The downside is it’s disruptive to the whole industry,” says Hargraves. “It’s going to cost $2 billion to build the first one and get it started. There is more engineering to be done.”

To complicate matters, most nuclear engineers today have never learned about MSRs. They dropped out of nuclear texts decades ago. There’s virtually no mention of thorium on Industry Canada’s website. Atomic Energy Canada Limited, despite a recent agreement with China on using thorium in its Candu reactors, doesn’t seem to be much invested in LFTRs. And although the Oak Ridge blueprints could easily be dusted off and used as a starting point, the financial exposure is huge.

“No matter how good our reactors are, they’re going to be fairly expensive to develop; anything nuclear is,” says Leblanc. “There are huge potential rewards but there are some pretty major costs as well. And that’s really hard to get people to work on.”

“Yes, we know that wind and solar can provide electricity, but we also know it can’t be the real solution,” says Leblanc. “It’s either nuclear or coal — and we’ve got a much better nuclear option to give people.”

THORIUM BY THE NUMBERS

THORIUM BY THE NUMBERS

0

The amount of CO2 emissions possible in 38 years if thorium-fired reactors replaced coal-fired plants.

1

The tonnes of thorium required to produce the same amount of energy as 200 tonnes of uranium or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal.

2

The tonnes of thorium required to power the GTA, Oakville, Burlington and Hamilton for a year.

300

The number of years required for LFTR waste to become safe, versus 10,000 years to make current reactor waste safe.

2,000

The square footage needed for a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), compared to the 200,000 square feet needed for a uranium-powered reactor.

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